Businesses do indeed like old stable software, and this is actually (or will be in the future) a plus for OSS. Proprietary vendors HATE old stable software because they make no profit on it... They want users to keep buying the latest and greatest, and they will eventually drop support for their old versions completely. This opens up these businesses to all manner of security holes which will never be fixed, and eventually the risk outweighs the cost and they are forced to upgrade. OSS on the other hand does not force anyone to update, and OSS based business models are based on support services rather than selling upgrades so companies providing OSS support couldn't care less what version of something you're using and will quite happily provide security updates and bugfixes for ancient software.
Also, while you're right about OSS evolving quickly, it does so in a gradual manner whereas proprietary software will evolve in bursts as new versions come out... If you keep track of OSS and update regularly, the differences between versions are very minor so you're not faced with sudden big differences.
There are also other reasons why companies don't update, such as cost and incompatibility... Many large companies retain old versions of proprietary apps because upgrading everything would be extremely costly and time consuming, while upgrading in stages would cause major compatibility problems.
I believe there is support for partitioning IO devices and assigning individual devices to a virtual instance... But to do that with a video card you'd need one per each instance of a running OS, since they would expect to have total control over it. You can reassign devices, but i don't think you can virtualize them because each instance of video drivers would expect the video card to be in a particular state (resolution etc).
OpenGL already supports network transparency, you could potentially just use that existing functionality to deliver the GL calls over a local interface to the local host...
These studies often fail to take many things into account...
One of the most common security issues i see with windows based networks, is a lack of patching for third party apps... A lot of places install the windows updates these days, but then they have ancient versions of various third party apps like av tools, remote management software, adobe acrobat etc... There is no single integrated way to update everything like there is on linux.
There is also the cost of third party apps which are needed on windows but come by default with linux distributions (and are therefore easily updated as part of the distro too, reducing patching effort)..
Linux also makes it easier to remove unwanted default apps, a smaller install will have less things that need patching and thus reduce the burden of testing and deploying patches.
Then there are various standards that you might need your network to comply with, such as PCI, where there are various requirements such as having remote logging for all devices... linux supports syslog out of the box, as do 99% of networking devices, windows doesn't and requires (often expensive) third party software. A lot of these standards are orders of magnitude cheaper to achieve with linux than windows.
But Apache has always had a much higher marketshare than iis, and has been around longer... IIS has improved in recent years, but look at the stats on attrition.org when that defacement mirror shut down in 2001, iis had about 25% market share but accounted for something like 60% of website defacements.
These days apache does generally count for more defacements, but is also still the most popular server... The stats dont say how sites were hacked, wether its a bug in the webserver itself, some other way that someone got access to the underlying os, or bugs in web based applications....
most php applications are hosted on apache because apache hosting is widely available cheaply, and php is extremely easy to learn which encourages people with very limited abilities to write php code, much of which is extremely poor... learning other languages such as aspx or jsp is harder and the hosting costs more so you tend to have less apps written by total novice programmers.
Not really in the grand scheme of things... Any costs associated with producing windows are already covered, so any subsequent copies sold are effectively pure profit. Piracy allowed MS software to become widespread, and continued piracy keeps it widely used... Think how many people in poor countries who can't afford windows would migrate to linux over night if it became impossible to use pirated windows?
Many europeans buy local cars, if you go to France you will se primarily French cars on the roads (Renault, Citroen, Peugeot)... Same in Germany (Audi, BMW, Mercedes). And even when american brands are offered, they are European oriented models (vauxhall/opel, ford have models like the fiesta, focus and mondeo in europe etc)..
This is a very good reason to ensure there is competition... A market will bear much higher priced from a monopoly simply because they have no other choice.
Have them do it with Zimbabwe dollars, the exchange rate reached several hundred trillion to one before it was most recently devalued...
The Zimbabwe government redenominated the ZWD again on February 2, 2009 at a rate of 1,000,000,000,000 old ZWD to 1 new ZWD, and its currently just under 400 new ZWD to 1 USD.
I have a set of uncirculated zimbabwe bank notes framed on my wall, just so i can say i'm a trillionaire... Good job they're uncirculated, because the currency became so worthless people were using it as a cheaper alternative to toilet paper.
With virtual images, it should be possible to migrate images from one system to another without shutting it down, so you can upgrade your physical servers one by one without the users noticing..
You can update applications without rebooting on most OS's... You couldn't update the underlying OS (DOS) which those versions of the windows application require without rebooting it.
I tried to sync my homedirs between machines, because it's annoying not having my settings and saved passwords etc on every machine.. But, the homedir on my desktop is 300gb in size, neither of my laptops even have that much space on them, especially the netbook. On the desktop i can keep everything i need, but the netbook needs to keep as small working set of whatever i'm working on at the time.
A lot of these "safety features" are just a nuisance... Many satnavs wont let you adjust the route if you're moving, but what if a passenger in the vehicle is trying the adjust the route on behalf of the driver? Similarly with TV, what if passengers want to watch it?
Stupid drivers will kill themselves regardless, if they can't watch tv on this as they drive they will just take their own portable set, or portable dvd player, or use a phone, or whatever else they're gonna do which is dangerous. All these "safety features" do is inconvenience the legitimate users.
Other architectures also have their own specific compilers... MIPSPro, Sun Studio, CCC.... The problem is that a lot of software is tied to gcc extensions, which is effectively a form of embrace and extend.
The problem is that mainstream distributions are trying to cater to as many users as possible, so they supply binaries which are targeted at a generic 686 (pentium pro) or even a 386... This is part of the reason why 64bit distros seem so much faster, because the lowest possible 64bit machine is still a lot closer to today's tech. The mainstream distros should define a cutoff point, and not support anything older... There will always be someone else to do that, with specific lightweight distributions.
Slashdot Mirror
Businesses do indeed like old stable software, and this is actually (or will be in the future) a plus for OSS.
Proprietary vendors HATE old stable software because they make no profit on it... They want users to keep buying the latest and greatest, and they will eventually drop support for their old versions completely. This opens up these businesses to all manner of security holes which will never be fixed, and eventually the risk outweighs the cost and they are forced to upgrade.
OSS on the other hand does not force anyone to update, and OSS based business models are based on support services rather than selling upgrades so companies providing OSS support couldn't care less what version of something you're using and will quite happily provide security updates and bugfixes for ancient software.
Also, while you're right about OSS evolving quickly, it does so in a gradual manner whereas proprietary software will evolve in bursts as new versions come out... If you keep track of OSS and update regularly, the differences between versions are very minor so you're not faced with sudden big differences.
There are also other reasons why companies don't update, such as cost and incompatibility... Many large companies retain old versions of proprietary apps because upgrading everything would be extremely costly and time consuming, while upgrading in stages would cause major compatibility problems.
I believe there is support for partitioning IO devices and assigning individual devices to a virtual instance... But to do that with a video card you'd need one per each instance of a running OS, since they would expect to have total control over it. You can reassign devices, but i don't think you can virtualize them because each instance of video drivers would expect the video card to be in a particular state (resolution etc).
OpenGL already supports network transparency, you could potentially just use that existing functionality to deliver the GL calls over a local interface to the local host...
Your proxy probably only supports http 1.0, which ie uses by default while firefox uses http 1.1, there is a setting to change that in about:config
IE has always had a really lousy javascript engine...
http://pentestmonkey.net/jsbm/index.html
Safari 4 seems very fast when its freshly started, but slows down a lot when it's been open a while...
These studies often fail to take many things into account...
One of the most common security issues i see with windows based networks, is a lack of patching for third party apps... A lot of places install the windows updates these days, but then they have ancient versions of various third party apps like av tools, remote management software, adobe acrobat etc... There is no single integrated way to update everything like there is on linux.
There is also the cost of third party apps which are needed on windows but come by default with linux distributions (and are therefore easily updated as part of the distro too, reducing patching effort)..
Linux also makes it easier to remove unwanted default apps, a smaller install will have less things that need patching and thus reduce the burden of testing and deploying patches.
Then there are various standards that you might need your network to comply with, such as PCI, where there are various requirements such as having remote logging for all devices... linux supports syslog out of the box, as do 99% of networking devices, windows doesn't and requires (often expensive) third party software. A lot of these standards are orders of magnitude cheaper to achieve with linux than windows.
But Apache has always had a much higher marketshare than iis, and has been around longer... IIS has improved in recent years, but look at the stats on attrition.org when that defacement mirror shut down in 2001, iis had about 25% market share but accounted for something like 60% of website defacements.
These days apache does generally count for more defacements, but is also still the most popular server... The stats dont say how sites were hacked, wether its a bug in the webserver itself, some other way that someone got access to the underlying os, or bugs in web based applications....
most php applications are hosted on apache because apache hosting is widely available cheaply, and php is extremely easy to learn which encourages people with very limited abilities to write php code, much of which is extremely poor... learning other languages such as aspx or jsp is harder and the hosting costs more so you tend to have less apps written by total novice programmers.
Then most users need simpler devices. Windows is far too complicated for the average user to keep securely connected to the internet.
Not really in the grand scheme of things...
Any costs associated with producing windows are already covered, so any subsequent copies sold are effectively pure profit. Piracy allowed MS software to become widespread, and continued piracy keeps it widely used... Think how many people in poor countries who can't afford windows would migrate to linux over night if it became impossible to use pirated windows?
Many europeans buy local cars, if you go to France you will se primarily French cars on the roads (Renault, Citroen, Peugeot)... Same in Germany (Audi, BMW, Mercedes). And even when american brands are offered, they are European oriented models (vauxhall/opel, ford have models like the fiesta, focus and mondeo in europe etc)..
They have also been buying existing brands which are established in Europe and rebranding them, Daewoo has become Chevrolet for instance...
This is a very good reason to ensure there is competition... A market will bear much higher priced from a monopoly simply because they have no other choice.
Have them do it with Zimbabwe dollars, the exchange rate reached several hundred trillion to one before it was most recently devalued...
The Zimbabwe government redenominated the ZWD again on February 2, 2009 at a rate of 1,000,000,000,000 old ZWD to 1 new ZWD, and its currently just under 400 new ZWD to 1 USD.
I have a set of uncirculated zimbabwe bank notes framed on my wall, just so i can say i'm a trillionaire... Good job they're uncirculated, because the currency became so worthless people were using it as a cheaper alternative to toilet paper.
With virtual images, it should be possible to migrate images from one system to another without shutting it down, so you can upgrade your physical servers one by one without the users noticing..
You can update applications without rebooting on most OS's...
You couldn't update the underlying OS (DOS) which those versions of the windows application require without rebooting it.
I wouldn't bother so much with applying the patches on reboot, if you're going to reboot anyway you could just install the regular updates.
Well no, because the party violating the GPL is also violating Nintendo's license and don't have rights to their code anyway...
I tried to sync my homedirs between machines, because it's annoying not having my settings and saved passwords etc on every machine..
But, the homedir on my desktop is 300gb in size, neither of my laptops even have that much space on them, especially the netbook.
On the desktop i can keep everything i need, but the netbook needs to keep as small working set of whatever i'm working on at the time.
Depends how many bullets the gun has, if it has 9 bullets whoever holds the gun could pre-emptively shoot everyone else...
What if the passenger wants to change the route on the satnav?
A lot of these "safety features" are just a nuisance...
Many satnavs wont let you adjust the route if you're moving, but what if a passenger in the vehicle is trying the adjust the route on behalf of the driver? Similarly with TV, what if passengers want to watch it?
Stupid drivers will kill themselves regardless, if they can't watch tv on this as they drive they will just take their own portable set, or portable dvd player, or use a phone, or whatever else they're gonna do which is dangerous. All these "safety features" do is inconvenience the legitimate users.
Other architectures also have their own specific compilers... MIPSPro, Sun Studio, CCC....
The problem is that a lot of software is tied to gcc extensions, which is effectively a form of embrace and extend.
How about on a gentoo system, where firefox has been compiled to target the particular cpu?
How about a 64bit system?
The problem is that mainstream distributions are trying to cater to as many users as possible, so they supply binaries which are targeted at a generic 686 (pentium pro) or even a 386... This is part of the reason why 64bit distros seem so much faster, because the lowest possible 64bit machine is still a lot closer to today's tech.
The mainstream distros should define a cutoff point, and not support anything older... There will always be someone else to do that, with specific lightweight distributions.
What if you compile the linux version using intel's compiler?